Thursday, December 13, 2018- Los Angeles to Seattle

Thursday, December 13, 2018- Los Angeles to Seattle

We really enjoy cruising, but hate the flying necessary to get to and from cruise ports.  Today’s journey started off smoothly with a final breakfast in the buffet.  I opted to have one last Norwegian waffle with the iconic Brunost brown goat cheese.

Our transfer from the ship to LAX was handled smoothly through Viking.  However, LAX is really lagging behind the world in International Airport technology and service.  The TSA staff seemed harried and the airport itself is cramped and dirty.  There are long lines out of most of the restrooms, and most of the elevators seem to be out of service, forcing us to lug our carry on luggage up and down stairs.  There are very few dining or shopping venues in the terminals, and the satellite terminals, that have to be reached by buses, have virtually no services besides an overcrowded and filthy toilet, and a pay-to-use American Airlines lounge.  The Wifi was also practically unusable because it was so unreliable. Come to think of it, LAX is the worst international airport that we have been in by a wide margin since we began traveling a lot. 

Once we got to our gate, we learned that our flight had been delayed by an hour, prompting a text alert that we might not make our connection from American Airlines.  Then moments later, the screen above our boarding gate changed again, now showing a delay of over 2 hours, so there was no way we would make our connection in Phoenix.  We went immediately to the American Airlines Customer rebooking center several gates away. Fortunately, when Ben got there, there were just a handful of people there, but one of the 3 customer service agents had her hands full with a woman who was having a full blown melt down, shouting both at the agent, and her husband on the end of her cell phone.  OMG, it was like Armageddon had arrived. Fortunately, Ben got the agent next to the one handling the meltdown, and she was able to rebook us on a direct flight from LAX to SEA on an American Eagle flight.  Because there was no longer a connection in Phoenix, we were actually going to end up in Seattle a little earlier than our original flights.  We didn’t even need to rebook our Whidbey Sea-Tac shuttle.

It was kind of fun running into fellow Viking Star passengers as they found their way around the terminals and gates to their outbound flights.  With such a small ship, it was hard not to get to know many of the fellow passengers.  A gal who played on a trivia team that sat right behind our team is also from the greater Seattle area, and they ended up on the same American Eagle flight.  We ended up having to gate check Ben’s carry on bag because all the overhead storage in the Embraer jet was full.   The sun was heading down rapidly as our jet was taxiing to our gate, and it had been raining.  It was a relief to find all our luggage at the carousel after our Baltic trip.  

As we drove our car home from the shuttle drop off lot, it seemed like the last 3 weeks were all just a dream.  Our first Viking Ocean cruise was a pleasant and enjoyable vacation.  We had been looking forward to seeing how the Viking Ocean cruise experience would compare with our previous cruise experiences on Princess and Norwegian.

The Viking cruise experience would be ideal for a demographic that is in their late 60’s to 70’s, enjoy sitting in the living room reading books, attend book clubs with wine pairings, must have a glass of wine or beer with every meal, hates crowds, enjoys bus tours and academic lectures. 

Viking has done an excellent job of designing their staterooms for function and comfort. The bathrooms are second to none, although we wished there was a thermostat to control the heated bathroom floor, which got too warm during the hot weather portions of the cruise. They do need to find a way to add a few more drawers to match Princess for storage space, but trading a few drawers for that spacious bathroom seems a worthwhile trade-off.

The public areas on the ship are very simple and elegant- a nod to their Nordic roots.  It felt more like a hotel than a cruise ship.  Think Volvo, rather than Cadillac.

The inclusive pricing on Viking would hit a sweet spot for those who have to have beer or wine at every meal, unlimited internet service and laundry.  If you didn’t have to have wine or beer at every meal, could get by with finding wifi hotspots at ports of call, and only do laundry once a week, you’d save a fair bit of money on more midstream cruise lines like Princess or Norwegian.  

Although the specialty dining venues have no extra cover charge on Viking Ocean, the cruise fare is high enough that you are simply pre-paying for access to these venues upfront.  The Chef’s table did offer an interesting and unique dining venue for us since we don’t typically choose to dine in places featuring Nouvelle Cuisine, and Manfredi’s did seem to offer a wider menu selection and better quality than the Princess or Norwegian cruise lines’ Italian specialty restaurant venues.  

Viking Ocean does offer a free land excursion in every port of call, but we found the excursions to be rather uninspiring and routine drive around the city, get out at an old town plaza to walk around and shop for 30-45 minutes, and then back to the ship.  On Princess or Norwegian, such excursions would be worth between $50-80 per person.  We did all the included tours, which are a decent basic introduction to these ports of call, but if they hadn’t been included at no cost, we would probably have booked more active or interesting tours.  We likely would have spent more per person at each port of call, looking back at the excursions we did on our Baltic cruise and South America cruises.

As for the overall dining experience, we would rank Viking Ocean a little below Princess, but above Norwegian for the quality, presentation, and service in the buffet and main dining room.  Since the Viking Ocean ships serve smaller numbers of passengers (930 vs 2500-3500), there are understandably fewer options on the buffet, but the quality of the food they do prepare is generally good. It’s also very nice that the wine, beer, espresso drinks and gelato are included without premium charge.

Where Princess beats Viking Ocean is their baked goods and desserts (Princess wins easily here) and service in the dining rooms and buffets.  Viking seems to hire younger and less experienced staff compared with Princess, although we did encounter a handful of very good waiters, whom had all had prior experiences on other cruise ship lines.  

Viking’s wait staff seem to depend too much on the iPhone apps they use to enter orders.  They use the app to determine what silverware to put out for each course and when to do it, but on Princess, the waitstaff consistently got our orders correct much more frequently than they did on Viking.  This is surprising since they enter your order on the iPhones, but if you proceed at a normal pace in giving them the order, their fingers consistently fall behind.  We learned that towards the end of the cruise and would specify each course and then watch the waiter to make sure he was done checking off all the boxes on his iPhone app before proceeding with the next course.

In terms of attentiveness of the staff during your meals, they were also slightly below Princess, but certainly better than Norwegian, where it was mostly set and forget.  But I’d have to say that even on Norwegian, they got our orders correct more often than on Viking Ocean.

The acoustics of most of the dining venues on the Viking Star were too loud for our tastes.  It was difficult to carry a conversation across a table. Viking needs to incorporate more sound absorbing decor into their dining venue designs.

What disappointed us most about our Viking Ocean cruise experience was the entertainment, or the relative lack thereof, particularly on the sea days.  We really enjoy participating in trivia.  The Viking Star only offered one trivia game on each at sea day and none on port days.  The trivia was done in the Explorer lounge, where there was never enough seating.  It got to be unpleasant for people to have to show up 45 minutes to an hour early to start to scrounge up seats and coffee tables to write on.  They really should have did the trivia at a time when they could have used a dining room like the Chef’s Table or Manfredi’s.

It was also disappointing that they only had general trivia- no multimedia, music, special themed or movie trivia.  On a Princess cruise, there are at least 2, and commonly 3 trivia games available during the course of the day on sea days, and even at least one trivia game on port days because many people choose to stay aboard at the more common ports of call.  They also didn’t really offer any sort of souvenir prizes.  Granted, nobody really needs key chains, coasters, water bottles or notebooks, but it’s fun to barter and exchange prizes on Princess.  On Viking Ocean, the winning team gets a round of Mimosas.  If you didn’t care for their Mimosas, you were out of luck.  

The cruise director’s staff did double and triple duty on the Viking Star, and were all very talented people. Given the limited resources on a ship that accommodates only 930 passengers, they did an admirable job with their shows. They put on shows on par with what we have seen on the Norwegian Pearl, but Princess has both Viking and Norwegian beat by a wide margin on the quality and variety of their stage productions and shows.  While we didn’t miss the casino, we did miss the dancing girls and fully instrumented stage band and string ensembles.

We never spent any time in the Casinos of the Norwegian or Princess ships that we have been on, but a few passengers we encountered missed not being able to play Bingo during the cruise.  There were Scrabble boards and many places people could sit and play cards or do jig saw puzzles, but on Princess and Norwegian, they have card tournaments, speed sudoku, bean bag (or penguin) tosses, paper airplane contests, boat building and racing contests, egg drop contests, and many more dancing classes, bars and lounges to enjoy.  There was no karaoke on the Viking Star.  

Viking did do a good job on their academic lectures, with specialists in history, culture, science, and natural history.  Our favorite was Dr. Carin Bondar, who was our resident biologist with a real flair for presenting interesting and bizarre science.  She should really have her own TV show.  She could easily knock Mr. Nye, the Science Guy out of his prime slot.

It was very convenient that most of the lectures were video taped and available on demand shortly after the actual presentation, so we could watch them at our convenience.  We found watching the history and culture lecture before bedtime to be an easy way to fall asleep.  We have certainly had some terrible speakers on Princess and Norwegian for port talks and lectures.

The video on demand system was well designed, and when it was working, it was even better than the Princess version.  It was unfortunate that the system went down on our 3 day stretch at sea between Guatemala and Cabo San Lucas.  The had attempted to do a system upgrade over the air that failed. We were in danger of being bored during that stretch, but were forced out of our room to attend the lectures in person, so that kept us moving.

The internet service was about on par with Norwegian and older Princess ships (0.5-1 megabit per second download) but vastly inferior to the Ocean Medallion internet service we experienced on Regal Princess during our Baltic cruise in July (5-10 megabits per second download).  We hope that level of service spreads throughout the cruise industry.  It was particularly vexing that the Viking internet service provider blocked access to all Apple servers during nearly the entire cruise, so iCloud services including photo streams and sharing, Apple News, and cloud syncing of notes and other iCloud documents didn’t work.  You couldn’t even load the Apple.com web page. I wasted a lot of time trying to figure out why I couldn’t get my files to exchange between my iPad and iPhone until I figured out that all Apple servers were blocked.  The IT staff on the ship were aware of this, and said they were working on it, but by the end of the cruise, it was still an ongoing problem.

In summary, we had a wonderful 21 day cruise from Miami to Los Angeles on the Viking Star.  We can check Cuba off our bucket list, and don’t feel the need to ever go back there again.  It’s funny that we now find ourselves experienced Caribbean and Panama Canal travelers.  Our favorite port of call was San Diego.  We’re glad that we got to meet up with Carl and visit the San Diego Zoo again. The antics of the koalas were unforgettable.  And we would book another Viking Ocean or River cruise in the future depending on finding a port intensive itinerary with very few at sea days, and a particularly good deal like free air fare to bring the overall cost closer to Princess fares.

Since we enjoy longer duration cruises, which include more sea days, and really enjoy the entertainment they offer on Princess, Princess will remain our cruise line of choice for now.